Connecting the dots

Last week my bestiest bestie Emily, my friend since we were 12, came to visit for a few days. Driving around town one day, we passed the place I’d been living when she last visited back in 2012: a tiny freestanding artist’s studio. It had a hotplate, a mini fridge, and a curtained-off nook hiding a toilet and teeny shower. It had beautiful glass french doors that did nothing to guard against the elements. It got so cold in winter I sometimes had to sleep with a hat and gloves on.

It was awesome.

I miss it to this day, but not because I was sublimely happy there. In spite of how much I dug its tiny crudeness, for the majority of the 18 months I lived in that in that studio I was a goddamn mess.

Still, I harbor an aching longing for that place, and driving by the other day it occurred to me why: it had been a near-literal cocoon that held me while I melted into soup and slowly reconstituted into solid matter.

Sitting next to me in the car as this all dawned on me was Em: the one person on the planet who would gladly follow me down any rabbit hole of memory, of insight. And so, needing no permission or invitation, I unfurled the rest of the story as we drove to our next stop.

The story, more or less…

Actually less. I’ve found I don’t want to put the gritty details here because, long ago as it was, the actual circumstances still feel profoundly tender. The overview, however, is this…

Having followed a very inconvenient gut knowing, I’d left a perfectly good long term relationship with a lovely human and moved out of the gorgeous, ample home we lived in. I had no assets of my own, a low paying part-time job, a beat-up car, and was deep in credit card debt. Disconnected from everything that was familiar and okay, my general inner state was lonely, messed up, terrified.

I recalled how the place held me in my heartbreak and bewilderment. Those four walls watched me drink bottles of chardonnay and fall into blackness. The old wooden porch absorbed my cigarette smoke and uncharitable thoughts. The nubby beige carpet received pints of desperate tears from a head that was often laying directly on it.

The little place hosted aftershocks of love lost as two intense crushes went nowhere. It cradled me in the devastation of a close friend’s death. It witnessed the first kisses with my new sweetie, my promotion at work and the income that suddenly made my days more sustainable. And it was so, so gracious when I had to say goodbye when an even more perfect living situation miraculously presented itself.

It held me. Through the most bewildering and transformative swoops of the life spiral, it held me.

Perspective on the now

I only talked for about ten minutes, but somehow I felt like a different person after. Laying the story out this way helped me see the shape of it—and what it was revealing about now, when I’m again feeling pretty liquified. Walking through a past instance of being soup assured me that I may indeed re-solidify one day.

Patient, brilliant Em, who had been listening quietly, pointed out what I wasn’t seeing: that this is the very thing I have just started inviting people to do in my 1:1 work—and that I’d just inadvertently proved to myself why it’s powerful. I wasn’t writing, or performing, or telling it for the sake of anything except connecting the dots of my own life, revealing patterns, illuminating where I might be headed.

I’m writing some of it here, yes, but the healing elixir of it was in that spontaneous conversation. We don’t always need to write stuff. Sometimes it’s more powerful when we don’t.

The straight-up miracle of this scene

So not only is this an insanely perfect entree into telling you about the Held program, it is also a completely unintentional, fully synchronistic scenario. I just happened to blurt out this story on that day because of who happened to be in the car, and the place we happened to pass on our drive. The fact that it came back full circle to the very thing I’d been wondering about (specifically: is this work helpful to anyone at all? If so, how?) is, well, a dang miracle. And we know I don’t like letting those stories go by.

What about you?

Any significant moments that have taken on more significance for you in reflecting on them? What do you notice is the difference between writing your stories and speaking them? To whom in your life is it effortless to tell them? Please share. And if you don’t feel like writing, ya know… let’s talk.